Hiya. I live in Southern California. We have a few bats I notice doing their thing in the evenings. I wanted to help them out, encourage more - we have a home where all sides are perfect for bat houses (height/clearance wise) But I realized we have an owl (or maybe 2) that is also a frequent visitor in our neighborhood in the late summer/autumn. Am I just setting up a danger buffet?

Okay, so I tried Tuta and found the UI clunky and buggy. I tried Mailbox.org and their billing is a mess and they took my money without crediting the account. *(I have a pending ticket, we'll see what they said.)

I do have a proton mail account, but I haven't given them $ yet because of... well you know. Sadly, out of the three I've tried their product is the best.

Wondering what to check out next. I really want to ditch the G but I'm evaluating services before I jump off the ledge this time.

So I'm relatively new to server hosting. (But experienced with remote web hosting from providers.) After about a year of fighting to run Nextcloud on a hosting company and finally losing everything from the cPanel vulnerability a few months ago, I broke down and launched my own home server. I'm looking for advice to maximize security.

CachyOS Linux with ClamAV Docker via Portainer Nextcloud (E2EE), Immich, DocuSeal and NoteTrace Routed through a domain and subdimains via Zero Trust Cloudflare Tunnel and Cloudflare DNS.

I have regular redundant backups both onsite and offsite with Duplicati.

My passwords for OS and all admin dashboards are extremely long, unique, random strings managed by Bitwarden.

I know just enough about this stuff to get into trouble. What else should I setup? I have little to no monitoring going on and don't know much about that direction.

So, I've got a homelab thing going, with NextCloud and Immich and other things... using Docker. But the one thing I can't seem to wrap my head around is how to get my calendar needs met behind the scenes. I'm hoping there's some sort of calendar syncing server I can use.

The problem: I use NextCloud and another android app to use my calendar. Easy. Historically, my household has used a single Google Calendar shared amongst members.

The real problem: They won't ditch Google. But I need a solution so that I can:

1. Sync their calendar events to my NextCloud calendar.
2. Sync my calendar events to their Google Calendar. I think that the issue here is, the share links that the calendars give, can only be used to list a new separate calendar on each of the respective platforms - not sync the events between the existing calendars...

I'm hoping that there's maybe a syncing solution out there that can play middle man and sync the two calendars directly, rather than having separate calendars for the two environments?

I hope this sort of post is ok. I'm looking for a comic strip I saw the other day (which may or not been here, I follow comics in multiple places) which depicted a woman walking her dog and stopping at a food truck and still buying the food even after she found out that they kill puppies with every purchase, because "it's sooo good!"

It could have been a metaphor for many things going on today, but I can't remember where I saw it and can't find it here. Can anyone help find it?

(And sorry if this is not allowed.)

Sorry for the little rant here, but I've spent years using every one of the high level alternative browsers. Vivaldi, Brave, Waterfox, Librewolf, Opera, Zen, Tor etc. And of course the mainline ones: Chrome and Firefox.

These days I'm primarily using Librewolf. But, lately, it seems like I'm having to switch over to proper Chrome or Firefox to get most of the websites I need to work properly and find that more often websites are just broken in it - navigation doesn't work, certain links that perform functions (ie not just HTML links) don't work, pages don't load properly. Etc. Usually, my first course of action is try the broken website in Waterfox, Vivaldi or Tor, and also trying them after disabling uBlock and the browsers built in blocking. Typically I find that the only browsers that the broken website operates properly in would be Chrome, Edge or Firefox. This makes me think it's a basic browser vs. website problem. (And the "theorist" in me is saying that this is not by accident. Websites with G Analytics (all of them?) etc probably are broken on purpose in non Chrome browsers, but I digress...)

And so I've come to the idea, that if I'm finding myself having to use proper Firefox (The only mainline browser I would really trust the "best".) to get the website to work half the time anyway, maybe it's better for me to use that and try and make it as private as possible? Outside of installing uBlock on Firefox - are there any holes that I can patch otherwise and not break websites?

TL:DR: I have an older Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. I hate the stock Samsung Voicemail app. What's a better one? I don't want to sign up for a service, and I would rather avoid sending all my voicemail data to a server somewhere. Privacy is a concern, but second to a good app, and transcription.

Longer story: For the longest time, we used carriers who seemed to control voicemail on their end, no app needed. I would receive an SMS transcription, and have the option to call and listen to voicemail or click a link etc.

We changed to Verizon a while back and suddenly my phone decided to start using the baked in Samsung Voicemail app to manage voicemail - which is terrible. 6 voicemails and it's already complaining that my inbox is full and I constantly have to delete voicemail - making this worse is I get 3-4 spam calls a day that just leave silent voicemails so it fills up every 2 days or so. Even though I decline unknown callers etc, they still leave voicemail and I can't block them. Also no transcription or anything...anyway, I'm stuck with this phone for the time being and want to know what the best options out there are. Googling this is obviously useless. Thanks for anyone's input!

Hiya! I've been using for dnsforge.de as my private DNS on my android phone for a year or so, and I've noticed about once a day my phone tells me that the dns can't be reached, and about once a week I can't access something on my phone without turning off the private dns.

Is this normal? I am in the US and I know they're in Germany, but I wondered if this happens to everyone or if something is going on with my phone, and if there are other good options?

Thanks!

I'm confused at what I'm missing here. In the System Settings Screen>Login Screen>Breeze (which is active theme) I've changed the background to a custom image. But it still shows the default image of geometric shapes. When I click the icon for the background it confirms that I have my image saved for the background.

However, when I first boot up my computer, the login screen is correct with my custom wallpaper. But when I've locked my computer with [OPT]-L the screen shows the default geometric wallpaper.

I'm at a loss of what to do here because I don't know them that well and don't want to be too intrusive.

For the past year or so I've been new friends with "Frankie", and although we are not close, I'd say we're more than acquaintances. We don't know each other well, and have interacted a handful of times. Frankie has been eager to socialize and do activities with us, and I hope to become better friends with Frankie.

I've always gotten a "vibe" from Frankie that things are not great at home. We've met the spouse a couple of times and they've always given me bad vibes; They are uninterested and unengaged, not really friendly. I'm pretty socially awkward myself and have had my share of unfair judgement based on misunderstood social interactions and so I just gave spouse some slack there.

But Frankie is unhappy. I can tell just from conversation Frankie struggles with depression and life. I know that Frankie sees a therapist and is trying to be more social and active to improve mental health. I check in on Frankie periodically by text and durring a text conversation tonight, there are red flags of an abusive relationship. I asked how Frankie was doing, and I got a response "Just a lot of isolation and depression." and later in the conversation I invited Frankie to an event this weekend and they said:

Frankie: "[Spouse] hates that stuff and won't let me go." Me: "Not even by yourself?" F: "Nope. Says I'm too trusting of people and will get hurt." Me: "Too trusting? How?" F: "I talk to strangers. I help people who need help. I smile and say hello to people whenever I'm out and about..."

At this point, I was a bit stunned and didn't know exactly how to respond. I've never had someone be so direct in telling me something like this before. I know this sounds very much like textbook isolation and gaslighting. But I also thought that because I don't know Frankie very well, this might just be an emotional moment. I can think of a couple times in my life where I was struggling emotionally and might have said something snide about my partner in confidence to someone else, and it wasn't really fair or truthful. I don't know anything about Frankie's mental health other than they are struggling.

Without judgement, I said "Well you're more than welcome to come with us [ to the event ] and we can keep an eye on you. wink wink" I tend to try and inject humor into things, even when it may not be appropriate. I don't know how else to handle it.

I said: "This sounds like a difficult situation, if you ever need to talk, I'm here." Frankie: "Yeah, it has been a difficult situation for a while."

I went on to be clear: Frankie is always welcome at our house, and I am always available to talk if needed. Let's hang out more. I couldn't bring myself to be more direct and inquire deeper because I feel like I don't know Frankie well enough, and also to put it bluntly: I can't handle being a counselor right now and that is usually my immediate reaction: to dive in over my head to help someone. I'm trying to break this habit already.

But now what? Do I leave it alone? Do I make more an effort to un-isolate Frankie? Do I trust that Frankie got the message that I'm here as an escape hatch? I always try to live that other people's marriages are none of my business - lord knows my own has had some very private struggles, but when it comes to abuse it's different. I just don't know what to do next?

I have had no problems with my BambuLabs A1 (with AMS lite) for the most part and generally love it. But for some reason this last, simple 1 color, one object print started doing something weird. Every 20-30 cm of line printed it goes and purges. (See picture, where it had only printed a short line and then went to purge. See all those white poops? That's from a previous attempt where it stopped repeatedly to purge, similarly.) It does this repeatedly. Although I'm not an expert in 3D Printing I can't think of a reason a printer would be doing this? (The print seems to come out fine if I let it do it's thing, it just wastes a LOT of material and takes much longer than it should.)

It's PLA, BTW.

Forgive me if this is not appropriate discussion here, but the description says discussion is allowed so here goes:

After some research and online discussion we decided to upgrade our cat's bathroom equipment from a regular litter box to a fancy expensive FurryTail automatic litter box. I am happy to report that generally we are very happy with it, the cats seem to love it, and overall it works great.

The only problem we're trying to figure out, is that it stinks worse than the regular cat box we used to have. I'm talking about right after use, not really "ambient" odor, but when the one cat uses it, the entire first floor of our home is eye-wateringly stinky. We never noticed this happen before. With the old analog cat box we almost never had odor problems. I suspect it has something to do with the cats burrying it before and now the machine "unburies" it while it's "fresh" and puts it in a bag that does not contain the evil... that's the only thing I can think of. The situation also puzzles us. This is a tiny monster, pooing in a nearly completely enclosed barrel, that is closed INSIDE an unused shower, in a tiny side bathroom. There are multiple layers of containment and it still manages to permeate the whole house. On top of that, while it seems like it's really just right after they use it, we're assuming we're getting nose blind and probably the whole house stinks more than we think, all the time.

I've been using activated charcoal in the receptacle and shower area. We also use the Arm and Hammer deodorizing powder in the litter itself. I'm wondering what else I can do? (besides go back to the old cat box.)

here's a cat tax photo of the poo poo monster just because: